And we have some new counties to add to the board, too.
The measles outbreak that began in the South Plains region of Texas rose to 422 cases and spread to two new counties on Tuesday, according to health officials.
The update from the Texas Department of State Health Services added 22 infections since the agency’s last update on Friday. The outbreak is mostly spreading in the South Plains region, but some cases have been reported in the Panhandle and northeast Texas.
The latest update also includes the first cases in Erath County, located southwest of Dallas, and Brown County, in west-central Texas.
The outbreak continues to be concentrated in children who have not received the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine, or whose vaccination status is unknown. Forty-one people have been hospitalized in Texas and one unvaccinated child has died, the first measles death in the United States since 2015.
Health officials in New Mexico and Oklahoma have said cases in those states are also connected to the Texas outbreak.
New Mexico reported 48 cases on Tuesday, while Oklahoma reported 10. New Mexico has also reported one suspected measles death, an unvaccinated adult who tested positive for the virus after dying.
Health departments in the Houston area have reported a handful of measles cases in recent months, but none have been connected to the outbreak.
Fort Bend County officials confirmed Sunday that a woman tested positive for measles after traveling outside the U.S. The Houston Health Department has reported three measles cases in 2025, all in people who recently returned from international travel.
Texas has reported a total of six measles cases in 2025 that are not associated with the South Plains outbreak. They are not included in the total of 422.
I had been thinking about making a graph of the case numbers, to get a visual clue about the growth rate, but thanks to this Reuters story, now I don’t have to. It may look like a bit of deceleration from this period, but note that there was a similarly modest increase in last Tuesday’s report, and then you saw what happened for Friday. We’re going to need to see several slow periods before we can say that things have leveled out.
ABC13 has a little more on the Fort Bend case. As with the Houston ones, you hope that it doesn’t go beyond that. More worrisome is the cases popping up in Erath and Brown counties. Erath is an exurb of the Metroplex, home of Stephenville. Brown is farther southwest of Erath and not really close to any major metro; it’s closer to Abilene than to Fort Worth. But both are still many miles away from the epicenter in West Texas. How it got from there to those places, that’s the concern.
I didn’t see any news out of Kansas – they may just be reporting once a week, in which case we’ll know more on Friday. Not much else of interest this time so I’ll end here, with the reminder that the unvaccinated population also includes infants who are too young to get the shot and really need herd immunity to be protected, and that Vitamin A may be doing more harm than good, which shouldn’t be that big a surprise given the misinformation climate that has led to it being in the conversation at all. Stay safe out there, y’all. The DMN has more.